Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western TechnologyPrinceton University Press, 2012 M09 17 - 360 páginas Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 78
... major contributions from other directions. Further perspectives are provided by corporate strategists and makers and critics of federal policies for technology. Although I have tried to draw judiciously upon all these sources, this book ...
... major technological advances have frequently been composed of waves or clusterings of sometimes seemingly unrelated inventions and innovations. What were the larger social, cultural, and economic settings of these clusterings? Which ...
... Major, long-lived corporations may have surviving archives and so escape the difficulty. But smaller undertakings, in many cases the principal seedbeds of technological innovation and experimentation, have universally fared less well ...
... major case, started a new clock ticking with a self-contained, autonomous set of propensities for change. It supports the misleading implication that each such discovery tends to contain within itself, ab initio, a consistent set of ...
... major increments in technological change came through small, multiple, gradual, and often almost unnoticed improvements. Characteristically, these tended to be more far-reaching in their cumulative effect than was apparent at the time ...
Contenido
3 | |
36 | |
3 Technology and the New European Society | 69 |
4 England as the Workshop of the World | 104 |
The American System Emerges | 138 |
6 The United States Succeeds to Industrial Leadership | 173 |
7 The Competitive Global System | 212 |
Technological Change in a Borderless World | 253 |
Notes | 279 |
References Cited | 301 |
Index | 327 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology Robert M. Adams Vista previa limitada - 2012 |
Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry Into Western Technology Robert McCormick Adams Sin vista previa disponible - 1996 |